Emergency legislation has been rushed through the Dáil and Seanad this evening in relation to the law governing the detention of people in mental hospitals.
The House was debating the Mental Health Bill 2008, which the Government said was required to close a loophole in the law on how people are detained in psychiatric hospitals against their will.
It comes in advance of a High Court judgment due tomorrow in the case of a woman challenging her detention in a psychiatric hospital in Dublin.
Minister for Health Mary Harney said that an adverse verdict could set free some 209 patients who had been "sectioned" or forcibly detained in mental health wards.
She said a potential procedural loophole existed because applications forms filled out on behalf of patients being sectioned gave limited scope to psychiatrists for the length of admission.
Ms Harney told the Dáil the Attorney General had been reviewing over 200 cases in recent weeks where patients were involuntarily detained, to ensure that all such detentions were valid.
The Minister told the Dáil this evening the legislation would not affect the rights of the patient concerned in tomorrow’s High Court judgment. She said she was satisfied the legislation was constitutional.
She told the House the decision to involuntarily detain somebody was “a very serious matter” and that nobody should be in such a situation unless it was “absolutely necessary”.
Such cases were all carefully reviewed by a number of psychiatrists, she added. “It is done in the patients’ interest. The clinical view is that these patients need to be in involuntary detention, and that has to come first.”
In tomorrow’s case, the High Court will deliver its reserved judgment on the challenge by a woman with a long history of mental illness to an order under which she remains detained against her will at St Patrick's hospital.